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# Nitoburg's 1969 Review of the Kerner Commission Report and Its Forecasts
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/prochital-v-sovetskoi-etnografii-za-1969-god-retsenziiu-s-zagolovkom-strana-idiot-k-raskolu/
- Published: 2026-11-06T14:09:35.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-06T14:20:15.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archive, Observations, Science, Society

I have been reading a review in "Soviet Ethnography" for 1969 under the headline "The Country Is Heading for a Split…".

Its author is the Americanist Eduard Nitoburg (1918-2008). He examines the report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which President Johnson set up in July 1967 after a wave of urban riots. Named after its chairman, the Governor of Illinois Otto Kerner, it went down in history as the Kerner Commission.

The occasion was a serious one. In the summer of 1967 unrest swept more than forty cities, and in Detroit it was put down with the help of the army. The commission interviewed some 1,200 people and in March 1968 issued a report containing the celebrated phrase:

> "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal."

The report sold about two million copies. Nitoburg retells its conclusions with satisfaction. The commission named as the cause of the riots not a "red plot" but "white racism", unemployment, the ghettos and police arbitrariness. The author himself adds that the country faces "a racial split and apartheid of the South African type", and that the commission's recommendations "do not go beyond the bounds of the old policy of the stick and the carrot" and "have remained only on paper".

It is amusing to read this today, because the forecast came true by half. The commission's diagnosis proved accurate. Racial segregation in housing and the income gap have not gone away, and the very formula of "two societies" still serves as the chief quotation in American debates about race.

On "only on paper" Nitoburg was in too much of a hurry. A week after the murder of Martin Luther King, in April 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, which banned discrimination in the sale and rental of housing. It is one of the measures the commission had called for. Apartheid of the South African type did not come to pass in the United States; the country neither split nor fell apart.

As for the forecast that by 1985 black residents would form the majority in the largest cities, it came true selectively, and the trend continues even today. So it turned out in Detroit, Atlanta, Baltimore and Newark.

The review shows well how Soviet American studies worked. American sources are quoted accurately and abundantly, but the conclusion is known in advance: capitalism is doomed, and reforms are powerless